‘Well now,’ said Josie, ‘half the girls from the village work up there cleaning and half the men on the land. I’d be saying maybe thirty or forty upstairs rooms, not that I’ve ever been in. We deliver the meat around the back to the old scold of a cook in the kitchens. They send all the laundry out to the convent on the road to Castlebar.’

Joe nearly choked on his pint. ‘Forty rooms! Holy moly, that’s the size of a hotel.’

No one in the bar had ever stayed in a hotel and they nodded, losing interest in his line of enquiry, and turned their attention to the wake and the prospect of free drinks.

‘Will his body be sent off to England?’ asked Seamus.

‘Sure, I’ve no idea,’ said Paddy. ‘I would imagine so. The Carters, they have houses over there too, loads of them. It was only the fishing and the sport that kept him here, and then he got too ill to travel. I’m sure he’d have preferred to have died in England, with his own sort around him. All he had here with him was you, Father, the doctor, and Bridget, but none of his family.’

‘That was all he needed,’ said Father Jerry, slightly wounded.

‘Now, who would this be?’ said Paddy, staring out the window at the man standing on the doorstep dressed in a dusty coat and formal hat and carrying a briefcase.

Father Jerry took pleasure in being able to pass on the information with authority. ‘Ah, now, that’s the—’ He looked stunned as Joe interrupted him and stole his moment of glory.

‘The lawyer,’ said Joe. ‘Or I’m losing my marbles.’

Father Jerry would have asked him how he knew that, and Joe would have told him that he’d mixed a great deal with lawyers of late, having become the biggest shareholder in one of the largest law firms in New York as a result of the generations-old Malone will. He could spot one a mile off. But the father had no chance to put the question because the man had already stepped into the bar.

The room fell deathly quiet as everyone in it appraised the stranger and everything about him, from the cut of his coat to the leather of his case.

The silence was only broken by Paddy rushing forward from behind the bar. ‘Sorry for your troubles,’ he said. ‘Is it a drink ye are after, or a meal maybe?’

‘All of those,’ said the man in a crisp English accent. ‘And do you have a clean room for the night, landlord?’

Within seconds, the stranger was surrounded. He was the entertainment for the evening and the source of news that even Mrs Doyle had no access to.

Joe remained at the back. He was only two years in the village, still considered to be a guest, a visitor. He would have to put down roots, become a member of the village and marry into it before he was fully considered to be a part of Tarabeg, even if he was Joe Malone the fourth and a direct descendant of Daedio’s brother. The word ‘hotel’ was flying round and round his brain. Wasn’t that just what the village needed to breathe life into it? To bring money in and lift the living standards? Maybe scraping a hand-to-mouth existence from the inhospitable land didn’t have to be the only way to survive around there. Ideas were tumbling into his thoughts as fast as he could process them. He had the money… He would buy the estate, turn the land into a golf course, sell the fishing rights and market holidays to the wealthier members of the Irish diaspora back in New York and Brooklyn. The flights from Shannon to New York with American Airlines were becoming more frequent by the day.